Lower City

Steamy sex, glistening sweat, dark photography, grungy ghetto colors, and sudden violence pervade this Brazilian feature from director Sergio Machado. Alice Braga (CITY OF GOD) stars as Karinna, a traveling prostitute who trades her favors to lifelong friends Deco (Lazaro Ramos) and Naldinho (Wagner Moura) for a ride back to Salvador on their run down boat. After Deco is almost killed at a cockfight, the three form a temporary menage-a-trois friendship, but the intense love each man feels for Karinna coupled with their homophobic macho wariness threatens to destroy their once unbreakable friendship. The pair starts hanging out at the seedy strip club where she plies her trade, each trying to one up the other, raising money from a life of crime and crooked boxing matches respectively. Machado culls a lot of sweaty atmosphere from his locations and a grimy cast of authentic locals as extras. The three leads ably convey the passion and pain of living in itinerant, eternal adolescence, lost in a glowing fog of cigarette smoke, sex, sweat, and neon, struggling towards some sort of stability in the haze. A big Cannes favorite, the film should please fans of sexy art-house hits like Y TU MAMA TAMBIEN and AMORES PERROS.